The sensation was not one of dying, but of being unravelled.
Marcus knew war.
He knew the heavy, iron smell of spilled blood, the deafening roar of artillery, and the horrific weight of a nuclear warhead turning sky and flesh into ash.
He had closed his eyes amidst a blinding light, accepting the bitter, quiet absurdity of his end.
Yet, he was not dead.
At least, not in the way he understood it.
Reality tore itself apart around him.
Darkness bled into light, and light collapsed back into void.
Day and night flashed past his eyes in microseconds, an agonizing, dizzying blur that felt as though his soul were being dragged through a narrow glass tube.
Then, the spatial storm ceased, hurling him headfirst into a maelstrom of violent turbulence.
Out of nothingness, a massive, monolithic structure rose amidst a roaring sea.
Thunder split the ink-black clouds, and towering waves slammed against the stone foundation of the ancient temple, threatening to tear it from its foundations.
Rain poured in dense, suffocating sheets.
Then, a voice echoed within the dark cavern of his mind.
It was not human.
It was cold and hollow, echoing like the toll of a cracked bronze bell.
[Aspirant!
Welcome to the Nightmare Spell.]
[Prepare for your First Trial…]
Marcus blinked, or at least tried to.
His eyes refused to open properly, bogged down by an overwhelming weight.
Darkness was all that welcomed him.
He opened his mouth to utter a command an instinct forged through two decades of leading armies, but A thick, coarse piece of leather had been forced into his mouth, completely muffling him.
He tried to spit it out, He tried to spit it out, but a metal harness held the gag firmly in place behind his head.
‘What in the hell…
The nuclear warhead…
Cassian…
my men…’
Panic was a luxury Marcus had trained himself to shed thirty years ago.
In an instant, his mind compartmentalized the confusion, forcing his heart rate to steady despite the terrifying unknown.
He attempted to move his hands to clear his mouth, but the moment he shifted, the sharp, heavy clinking of iron chains echoed around him.
He couldn’t move.
He was forced onto his knees against cold, slick stone.
Heavy iron shackles bound his wrists behind his back, anchored tightly to the floor.
Additional chains wrapped around his ankles and kept his collar pulled downward, forcing him into a humiliating, submissive posture.
A thick cloth blindfold blocked his vision entirely.
‘Chained.
Gagged.
Blinded.’ Marcus’s military mind instantly calculated his combat readiness: zero.
Clank.
Suddenly, rough hands grabbed the back of his hair, yanking his head backward.
A sharp tug severed the blindfold, exposing his eyes to a dim, nauseating light.
Slowly, his vision adjusted.
But as the blurry shapes coalesced into sharp reality, a frigid chill ran straight down his spine.
Standing directly in front of him were two towering figures clad in tattered, crimson-stained robes.
Deep hoods obscured their faces in total shadow.
One of them held a brutal, spiked iron sledgehammer, its head caked in dried bone dust and dark, coagulated gore.
Fresh droplets of crimson trickled down the wooden handle, splattering onto the floor.
The room was vast, circular, and bathed in an eerie, blood-red hue emitted by ancient, oil-burning braziers mounted on stone pillars.
The air was thick, humid, and heavy with a stench so foul it burnt the back of his throat a mixture of stagnant seawater, copper, rotting flesh, and unwashed fear.
There were no windows.
No vents.
Just a suffocating tomb carved into the belly of the earth.
Marcus shifted his gaze slightly, scanning the rest of the room.
He wasn’t alone.
Dozens of other young men and women were scattered across the stone floor, bound in the exact same manner.
Their clothes were reduced to filthy rags, barely covering their emaciated bodies.
Severe marks of torture, jagged whip scars, deep burns, and infected puncture wounds littered their skin.
They were starving, broken, and shivering in the damp cold.
‘Am I in Hell?’ Marcus thought, his eyes narrowing.
‘Or did the enemy capture me before the blast?’
No, that made no sense.
The architecture was ancient, primitive, yet imbued with an unnatural, oppressive weight that no modern facility possessed.
Without a word, the two hooded cultists turned away from Marcus.
They walked toward a young man chained a few paces to his left.
One of them reached down, produced a heavy brass key, and unlocked the iron anchors fastening the boy’s chains to the floor.
The moment the weight lifted, the prisoner began to thrash hysterically, muffled screams tearing from his leather-bound throat.
He kicked, wriggled, and tried to crawl away on all fours.
The cultist holding the spiked hammer didn’t even flinch.
He raised a heavy leather boot and brought it crashing down against the boy’s back.
A sickening crack echoed through the hall, instantly paralyzing the prisoner’s legs.
The two cultists seized the half-conscious, weeping boy by his hair and dragged him toward a massive, archway-shaped iron door at the far end of the temple.
The door creaked open, revealing a pitch-black corridor that seemed to swallow the dim torchlight.
They dragged him inside, and the iron door slammed shut with a heavy, final thud.
For a few seconds, the muffled, agonizing screams of the boy vibrated through the stone floor…
until they abruptly stopped.
‘They are culling them,’ Marcus realized, his blood running cold.
He gritted his teeth against the leather gag, refusing to let desperation take root.
Marcus had survived ambushes, sieges, and betrayals.
He was a Supreme Commander.
He would not die as cattle in a dark room.
He attempted to exert force, testing the structural integrity of his bindings.
He braced his feet against the stone and pulled against his restraints.
Clank.
Nothing moved.
The iron was far too thick, and as he pushed his body to its absolute limit, a wave of profound exhaustion washed over him.
His lungs burned, his muscles cramped, and a deep, agonizing ache throbbed in his ribs.
Marcus paused, looking down at his arms.
These were not his arms.
The arms he had possessed for decades were thick, scarred from blade and shrapnel, and forged through forty years of ruthless military training.
The wrists currently bound in iron were thin, pale, and horribly emaciated.
His fingers were slender, his knuckles raw and bruised.
He looked down at his torso his ribs protruded starkly beneath pale skin covered in fresh welts and old, faded scars.
‘This isn’t my body,’ he realized, a wave of shock rippling through his consciousness.
‘This is the body of a teenager.
Sixteen, maybe seventeen at most.
Severely malnourished.
Tortured.’
He had been transmigrated.
Reborn into a dying body, locked inside a meat grinder.
Marcus closed his eyes, taking a long, ragged breath through his nose.
He forced his breathing to slow, conserving every ounce of precious oxygen.
‘Think, Marcus.
Think.
The voice before I woke up…
it said something.’
Spell.
Nightmare Spell.
Aspirant.
As if summoned by his very thoughts, the air in front of his eyes vibrated.
Shimmering, diamond-like runes ignited out of the darkness, hovering silently in his vision.
The symbols belonged to no language he had ever studied on Earth, yet their meaning flowed seamlessly into his mind, translated by an unseen force.
Name: Aiden
True Name: —
Rank: Aspirant
Soul Core: Dormant
Memories: —
Echoes: —
Attributes: [Cursed], [Emotional Vessel]
[Aspect: Temple Vessel]
Aspect Description:
[You have been deemed suitable to house the essence of a higher being.
Yet, there is nothing special about you.
You are merely a vessel—a disposable shell, unworthy of existence beyond the purpose for which you were chosen.]
Marcus, as his soul still remembered stared at the text in disbelief.
‘Temple Vessel?
A disposable shell?
And who is Aiden?’
He focused his intent on the runes, trying to dig deeper.
The text shifted, expanding to reveal the specifics of his attributes.
[Attribute: Cursed]
Something has taken root within your fate.
It cannot be removed, cannot be escaped, and cannot be forgotten.
Wherever you go, the curse follows.
[Attribute: Emotional Vessel]
Your soul is unusually receptive to emotions.
The stronger the emotion, the deeper its imprint upon you.
‘How the hell is this going to help me!’
Heavy footsteps echoed outside.
The iron door at the end of the room swung open once more.
The two cultists re-emerged.
Fresh, gleaming blood painted their red robes, dripping continuously onto the stone floor.
The one holding the spiked hammer wiped the tool on his sleeve, leaving a dark smear of brains and gore across the fabric.
‘Oh shit.
That’s not good.’
The cultists moved with sickening slowness, walking down the central aisle of the room.
The remaining prisoners shrank back as much as their chains allowed, terrified, whimpering sounds leaking from behind their leather gags.
The executioners stopped in front of a young man two rows ahead of Marcus.
The prisoner immediately burst into tears.
His shoulders heaved violently, his eyes wide with absolute, unadulterated terror.
He thrashed against his chains, his feet scraping uselessly against the stone as he tried to push himself backward.
He looked at the other captives, his eyes pleading for help, for a miracle, for anything.
None of them looked back.
They turned their heads away, relieved that it was not their turn.
The cultists didn’t waste a second.
The brass key clicked into the lock.
The chains dropped.
They grabbed the weeping boy by his ankles and yanked him across the floor like a sack of grain.
The iron door slammed shut behind them once again.
Silence returned to the hall, broken only by the crackle of the braziers and the distant roar of the storm outside.
Marcus looked at the remaining prisoners.
Their eyes were hollow, devoid of life, devoid of defiance.
They weren’t just captives; they were broken cattle waiting for the slaughterhouse.
They had accepted their deaths.
‘Hopelessness,’ Marcus thought, his jaw tightening against the gag.
‘The moment a soldier accepts defeat, he is already dead.
I refused to yield to an invading army.
I am certainly not yielding to a pair of butchers in rags.’
The sequence has been restructured so Marcus contemplates his situation first before the cultists return and head directly for him
Marcus forced his breathing to remain steady, tuning out the suffocating stench of copper and rot.
Every combat instinct forged through decades of warfare urged him to assess the situation, but the sheer absurdity of his reality was impossible to ignore.
‘Transmigration…’
The word echoed quietly within his mind, carrying the weight of a surreal nightmare.
As a Supreme Commander, Marcus had dealt in cold, hard facts: logistics, military strategy, physics, and firepower.
Concepts like soul transference, alternate dimensions, and waking up in another person’s body belonged to the realm of absurd fiction, not the brutal reality of the battlefield.
Yet, he was here.
He felt the icy bite of iron against his wrists.
He felt the sickening ache of malnutrition in his fragile ribs.
He had watched a nuclear warhead erase his nation in a blinding flash of white, only to awaken inside a teenage body trapped in an ancient, blood-stained temple.
‘Is it truly possible?’ he questioned, his dark eyes narrowing into the gloom.
‘Did my soul cross the void between worlds, or is this some insidious psychic trap engineered before the blast?’
No illusion could fabricate the sheer, crushing reality of his pain.
The raw welts on his skin, the heavy leather gag forcing his jaw open, and the shimmering, diamond-like text hovering in his vision were far too real.
The Nightmare Spell had chosen him, binding his soul to a fragile, broken container.
He didn’t understand how the Spell worked yet, nor did he know why he had been brought to this miserable place.
But one truth remained absolute, no matter the world: a soldier does not surrender while he still draws breath.
‘If this world wants to treat me as a disposable shell..It is going to find out how sharp a broken vessel can be.’Marcus thought, his jaw tightening against the gag
CLANG!
The heavy iron door slammed open, shattering his train of thought.
The two executioners re-entered the hall for the third time.
This time, however, they did not wander through the room.
They did not scan the remaining prisoners.
Their hooded heads turned in unison, their hidden eyes locking directly onto Marcus.
The cultist with the spiked hammer raised his hand, pointing a pale, dirt-caked finger straight at Marcus’s chest.
A raspy, guttural voice leaked from beneath his hood, speaking in that ancient, chilling tongue
“The Vessel is ready.
Bring him to the Altar.”
They began walking with heavy, bone-chilling steps directly toward him.
The two executioners stopped right in front of Marcus.
The taller cultist reached into his robes, producing a heavy brass key, while the second raised the spiked hammer, locking his unseen gaze onto Marcus’s pale face.
Click.
The lock on his iron collar disengaged, dropping the heavy chains to the stone floor with a deafening crash.
Before Marcus could shift his weight, rough, calloused hands grabbed him by his hair and arms, hauling his emaciated body upward into the dark, unknown depths of the temple.